OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
QPanda: high-performance quantum computing framework for multiple application scenarios
Venue: arXiv cs.PL 2022
Year: 2022

With the birth of Noisy Intermediate Scale Quantum (NISQ) devices and the verification of "quantum supremacy" in random number sampling and boson sampling, more and more fields hope to use quantum computers to solve specific problems, such as aerodynamic design, route allocation, financial option prediction, quantum chemical simulation to find new materials, and the challenge of quantum cryptography to automotive industry security. However, these fields still need to constantly explore quantum algorithms that adapt to the current NISQ machine, so a quantum programming framework that can face multi-scenarios and application needs is required. Therefore, this paper proposes QPanda, an application scenario-oriented quantum programming framework with high-performance simulation. Such as designing quantum chemical simulation algorithms based on it to explore new materials, building a quantum machine learning framework to serve finance, etc. This framework implements high-performance simulation of quantum circuits, a configuration of the fusion processing backend of quantum computers and supercomputers, and compilation and optimization methods of quantum programs for NISQ machines. Finally, the experiment shows that quantum jobs can be executed with high fidelity on the quantum processor using quantum circuit compile and optimized interface and have better simulation performance.
Maximizing Use-Case Specificity through Precision Model Tuning
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

Language models have become increasingly popular in recent years for tasks like information retrieval. As use-cases become oriented toward specific domains, fine-tuning becomes default for standard performance. To fine-tune these models for specific tasks and datasets, it is necessary to carefully tune the model's hyperparameters and training techniques. In this paper, we present an in-depth analysis of the performance of four transformer-based language models on the task of biomedical information retrieval. The models we consider are DeepMind's RETRO (7B parameters), GPT-J (6B parameters), GPT-3 (175B parameters), and BLOOM (176B parameters). We compare their performance on the basis of relevance, accuracy, and interpretability, using a large corpus of 480000 research papers on protein structure/function prediction as our dataset. Our findings suggest that smaller models, with <10B parameters and fine-tuned on domain-specific datasets, tend to outperform larger language models on highly specific questions in terms of accuracy, relevancy, and interpretability by a significant margin (+50% on average). However, larger models do provide generally better results on broader prompts.
An Enhanced LiDAR-Inertial SLAM System for Robotics Localization and Mapping
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2022
Year: 2022

The LiDAR and inertial sensors based localization and mapping are of great significance for Unmanned Ground Vehicle related applications. In this work, we have developed an improved LiDAR-inertial localization and mapping system for unmanned ground vehicles, which is appropriate for versatile search and rescue applications. Compared with existing LiDAR-based localization and mapping systems such as LOAM, we have two major contributions: the first is the improvement of the robustness of particle swarm filter-based LiDAR SLAM, while the second is the loop closure methods developed for global optimization to improve the localization accuracy of the whole system. We demonstrate by experiments that the accuracy and robustness of the LiDAR SLAM system are both improved. Finally, we have done systematic experimental tests at the Hong Kong science park as well as other indoor or outdoor real complicated testing circumstances, which demonstrates the effectiveness and efficiency of our approach. It is demonstrated that our system has high accuracy, robustness, as well as efficiency. Our system is of great importance to the localization and mapping of the unmanned ground vehicle in an unknown environment.
Graph Searching with Predictions
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2022
Year: 2022

Consider an agent exploring an unknown graph in search of some goal state. As it walks around the graph, it learns the nodes and their neighbors. The agent only knows where the goal state is when it reaches it. How do we reach this goal while moving only a small distance? This problem seems hopeless, even on trees of bounded degree, unless we give the agent some help. This setting with ''help'' often arises in exploring large search spaces (e.g., huge game trees) where we assume access to some score/quality function for each node, which we use to guide us towards the goal. In our case, we assume the help comes in the form of distance predictions: each node $v$ provides a prediction $f(v)$ of its distance to the goal vertex. Naturally if these predictions are correct, we can reach the goal along a shortest path. What if the predictions are unreliable and some of them are erroneous? Can we get an algorithm whose performance relates to the error of the predictions? In this work, we consider the problem on trees and give deterministic algorithms whose total movement cost is only $O(OPT + Δ\cdot ERR)$, where $OPT$ is the distance from the start to the goal vertex, $Δ$ the maximum degree, and the $ERR$ is the total number of vertices whose predictions are erroneous. We show this guarantee is optimal. We then consider a ''planning'' version of the problem where the graph and predictions are known at the beginning, so the agent can use this global information to devise a search strategy of low cost. For this planning version, we go beyond trees and give an algorithms which gets good performance on (weighted) graphs with bounded doubling dimension.
Multi-Agent Deep Reinforcement Learning Based Resource Management in SWIPT Enabled Cellular Networks with H2H/M2M Co-Existence
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2022
Year: 2022

Machine-to-Machine (M2M) communication is crucial in developing Internet of Things (IoT). As it is well known that cellular networks have been considered as the primary infrastructure for M2M communications, there are several key issues to be addressed in order to deploy M2M communications over cellular networks. Notably, the rapid growth of M2M traffic dramatically increases energy consumption, as well as degrades the performance of existing Human-to-Human (H2H) traffic. Sustainable operation technology and resource management are efficacious ways for solving these issues. In this paper, we investigate a resource management problem in cellular networks with H2H/M2M coexistence. First, considering the energy-constrained nature of machine type communication devices (MTCDs), we propose a novel network model enabled by simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT), which empowers MTCDs with the ability to simultaneously perform energy harvesting (EH) and information decoding. Given the diverse characteristics of IoT devices, we subdivide MTCDs into critical and tolerable types, further formulating the resource management problem as an energy efficiency (EE) maximization problem under divers Quality-of-Service (QoS) constraints. Then, we develop a multi-agent deep reinforcement learning (DRL) based scheme to solve this problem. It provides optimal spectrum, transmit power and power splitting (PS) ratio allocation policies, along with efficient model training under designed behaviour-tracking based state space and common reward function. Finally, we verify that with a reasonable training mechanism, multiple M2M agents successfully work cooperatively in a distributed way, resulting in network performance that outperforms other intelligence approaches in terms of convergence speed and meeting the EE and QoS requirements.
Learning Implicit Functions for Dense 3D Shape Correspondence of Generic Objects
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

The objective of this paper is to learn dense 3D shape correspondence for topology-varying generic objects in an unsupervised manner. Conventional implicit functions estimate the occupancy of a 3D point given a shape latent code. Instead, our novel implicit function produces a probabilistic embedding to represent each 3D point in a part embedding space. Assuming the corresponding points are similar in the embedding space, we implement dense correspondence through an inverse function mapping from the part embedding vector to a corresponded 3D point. Both functions are jointly learned with several effective and uncertainty-aware loss functions to realize our assumption, together with the encoder generating the shape latent code. During inference, if a user selects an arbitrary point on the source shape, our algorithm can automatically generate a confidence score indicating whether there is a correspondence on the target shape, as well as the corresponding semantic point if there is one. Such a mechanism inherently benefits man-made objects with different part constitutions. The effectiveness of our approach is demonstrated through unsupervised 3D semantic correspondence and shape segmentation.
Error syntax aware augmentation of feedback comment generation dataset
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

This paper presents a solution to the GenChal 2022 shared task dedicated to feedback comment generation for writing learning. In terms of this task given a text with an error and a span of the error, a system generates an explanatory note that helps the writer (language learner) to improve their writing skills. Our solution is based on fine-tuning the T5 model on the initial dataset augmented according to syntactical dependencies of the words located within indicated error span. The solution of our team "nigula" obtained second place according to manual evaluation by the organizers.
"Real Attackers Don't Compute Gradients": Bridging the Gap Between Adversarial ML Research and Practice
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2022
Year: 2022

Recent years have seen a proliferation of research on adversarial machine learning. Numerous papers demonstrate powerful algorithmic attacks against a wide variety of machine learning (ML) models, and numerous other papers propose defenses that can withstand most attacks. However, abundant real-world evidence suggests that actual attackers use simple tactics to subvert ML-driven systems, and as a result security practitioners have not prioritized adversarial ML defenses. Motivated by the apparent gap between researchers and practitioners, this position paper aims to bridge the two domains. We first present three real-world case studies from which we can glean practical insights unknown or neglected in research. Next we analyze all adversarial ML papers recently published in top security conferences, highlighting positive trends and blind spots. Finally, we state positions on precise and cost-driven threat modeling, collaboration between industry and academia, and reproducible research. We believe that our positions, if adopted, will increase the real-world impact of future endeavours in adversarial ML, bringing both researchers and practitioners closer to their shared goal of improving the security of ML systems.
BagFormer: Better Cross-Modal Retrieval via bag-wise interaction
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2022
Year: 2022

In the field of cross-modal retrieval, single encoder models tend to perform better than dual encoder models, but they suffer from high latency and low throughput. In this paper, we present a dual encoder model called BagFormer that utilizes a cross modal interaction mechanism to improve recall performance without sacrificing latency and throughput. BagFormer achieves this through the use of bag-wise interactions, which allow for the transformation of text to a more appropriate granularity and the incorporation of entity knowledge into the model. Our experiments demonstrate that BagFormer is able to achieve results comparable to state-of-the-art single encoder models in cross-modal retrieval tasks, while also offering efficient training and inference with 20.72 times lower latency and 25.74 times higher throughput.
Properties of Group Fairness Metrics for Rankings
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

In recent years, several metrics have been developed for evaluating group fairness of rankings. Given that these metrics were developed with different application contexts and ranking algorithms in mind, it is not straightforward which metric to choose for a given scenario. In this paper, we perform a comprehensive comparative analysis of existing group fairness metrics developed in the context of fair ranking. By virtue of their diverse application contexts, we argue that such a comparative analysis is not straightforward. Hence, we take an axiomatic approach whereby we design a set of thirteen properties for group fairness metrics that consider different ranking settings. A metric can then be selected depending on whether it satisfies all or a subset of these properties. We apply these properties on eleven existing group fairness metrics, and through both empirical and theoretical results we demonstrate that most of these metrics only satisfy a small subset of the proposed properties. These findings highlight limitations of existing metrics, and provide insights into how to evaluate and interpret different fairness metrics in practical deployment. The proposed properties can also assist practitioners in selecting appropriate metrics for evaluating fairness in a specific application.
Characterization of the Global Bias Problem in Aerial Federated Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2022
Year: 2022

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) mobility enables flexible and customized federated learning (FL) at the network edge. However, the underlying uncertainties in the aerial-terrestrial wireless channel may lead to a biased FL model. In particular, the distribution of the global model and the aggregation of the local updates within the FL learning rounds at the UAVs are governed by the reliability of the wireless channel. This creates an undesirable bias towards the training data of ground devices with better channel conditions, and vice versa. This paper characterizes the global bias problem of aerial FL in large-scale UAV networks. To this end, the paper proposes a channel-aware distribution and aggregation scheme to enforce equal contribution from all devices in the FL training as a means to resolve the global bias problem. We demonstrate the convergence of the proposed method by experimenting with the MNIST dataset and show its superiority compared to existing methods. The obtained results enable system parameter tuning to relieve the impact of the aerial channel deficiency on the FL convergence rate.
Deep Temporal Contrastive Clustering
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Recently the deep learning has shown its advantage in representation learning and clustering for time series data. Despite the considerable progress, the existing deep time series clustering approaches mostly seek to train the deep neural network by some instance reconstruction based or cluster distribution based objective, which, however, lack the ability to exploit the sample-wise (or augmentation-wise) contrastive information or even the higher-level (e.g., cluster-level) contrastiveness for learning discriminative and clustering-friendly representations. In light of this, this paper presents a deep temporal contrastive clustering (DTCC) approach, which for the first time, to our knowledge, incorporates the contrastive learning paradigm into the deep time series clustering research. Specifically, with two parallel views generated from the original time series and their augmentations, we utilize two identical auto-encoders to learn the corresponding representations, and in the meantime perform the cluster distribution learning by incorporating a k-means objective. Further, two levels of contrastive learning are simultaneously enforced to capture the instance-level and cluster-level contrastive information, respectively. With the reconstruction loss of the auto-encoder, the cluster distribution loss, and the two levels of contrastive losses jointly optimized, the network architecture is trained in a self-supervised manner and the clustering result can thereby be obtained. Experiments on a variety of time series datasets demonstrate the superiority of our DTCC approach over the state-of-the-art.
Novel Spring Mechanism Enables Iterative Energy Accumulation under Force and Deformation Constraints
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2022
Year: 2022

Springs can provide force at zero net energy cost by recycling negative mechanical work to benefit motor-driven robots or spring-augmented humans. However, humans have limited force and range of motion, and motors have a limited ability to produce force. These limits constrain how much energy a conventional spring can store and, consequently, how much assistance a spring can provide. In this paper, we introduce an approach to accumulating negative work in assistive springs over several motion cycles. We show that, by utilizing a novel floating spring mechanism, the weight of a human or robot can be used to iteratively increase spring compression, irrespective of the potential energy stored by the spring. Decoupling the force required to compress a spring from the energy stored by a spring advances prior works, and could enable spring-driven robots and humans to perform physically demanding tasks without the use of large actuators.
Eliminating Meta Optimization Through Self-Referential Meta Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Meta Learning automates the search for learning algorithms. At the same time, it creates a dependency on human engineering on the meta-level, where meta learning algorithms need to be designed. In this paper, we investigate self-referential meta learning systems that modify themselves without the need for explicit meta optimization. We discuss the relationship of such systems to in-context and memory-based meta learning and show that self-referential neural networks require functionality to be reused in the form of parameter sharing. Finally, we propose fitness monotonic execution (FME), a simple approach to avoid explicit meta optimization. A neural network self-modifies to solve bandit and classic control tasks, improves its self-modifications, and learns how to learn, purely by assigning more computational resources to better performing solutions.
Pensieve 5G: Implementation of RL-based ABR Algorithm for UHD 4K/8K Content Delivery on Commercial 5G SA/NR-DC Network
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2022
Year: 2022

While the rollout of the fifth-generation mobile network (5G) is underway across the globe with the intention to deliver 4K/8K UHD videos, Augmented Reality (AR), and Virtual Reality (VR) content to the mass amounts of users, the coverage and throughput are still one of the most significant issues, especially in the rural areas, where only 5G in the low-frequency band are being deployed. This called for a high-performance adaptive bitrate (ABR) algorithm that can maximize the user quality of experience given 5G network characteristics and data rate of UHD contents. Recently, many of the newly proposed ABR techniques were machine-learning based. Among that, Pensieve is one of the state-of-the-art techniques, which utilized reinforcement-learning to generate an ABR algorithm based on observation of past decision performance. By incorporating the context of the 5G network and UHD content, Pensieve has been optimized into Pensieve 5G. New QoE metrics that more accurately represent the QoE of UHD video streaming on the different types of devices were proposed and used to evaluate Pensieve 5G against other ABR techniques including the original Pensieve. The results from the simulation based on the real 5G Standalone (SA) network throughput shows that Pensieve 5G outperforms both conventional algorithms and Pensieve with the average QoE improvement of 8.8% and 14.2%, respectively. Additionally, Pensieve 5G also performed well on the commercial 5G NR-NR Dual Connectivity (NR-DC) Network, despite the training being done solely using the data from the 5G Standalone (SA) network.
Multi-modal deep learning system for depression and anxiety detection
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2022
Year: 2022

Traditional screening practices for anxiety and depression pose an impediment to monitoring and treating these conditions effectively. However, recent advances in NLP and speech modelling allow textual, acoustic, and hand-crafted language-based features to jointly form the basis of future mental health screening and condition detection. Speech is a rich and readily available source of insight into an individual's cognitive state and by leveraging different aspects of speech, we can develop new digital biomarkers for depression and anxiety. To this end, we propose a multi-modal system for the screening of depression and anxiety from self-administered speech tasks. The proposed model integrates deep-learned features from audio and text, as well as hand-crafted features that are informed by clinically-validated domain knowledge. We find that augmenting hand-crafted features with deep-learned features improves our overall classification F1 score comparing to a baseline of hand-crafted features alone from 0.58 to 0.63 for depression and from 0.54 to 0.57 for anxiety. The findings of our work suggest that speech-based biomarkers for depression and anxiety hold significant promise in the future of digital health.
Layer Imbalance Aware Multiplex Network Embedding
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2022
Year: 2022

Multiplex network embedding is an effective technique to jointly learn the low-dimensional representations of nodes across network layers. However, the number of edges among layers may vary significantly. This data imbalance will lead to performance degradation especially on the sparse layer due to learning bias and the adverse effects of irrelevant or conflicting data in other layers. In this paper, a Layer Imbalance Aware Multiplex Network Embedding (LIAMNE) method is proposed where the edges in auxiliary layers are under-sampled based on the node similarity in the embedding space of the target layer to achieve balanced edge distribution and to minimize noisy relations that are less relevant to the target layer. Real-world datasets with different degrees of layer imbalance are used for experimentation. The results demonstrate that LIAMNE significantly outperforms several state-of-the-art multiplex network embedding methods in link prediction on the target layer. Meantime, the comprehensive representation of the entire multiplex network is not compromised by the sampling method as evaluated by its performance on the node classification task.